City and town budgets are beginning to strain under all the weight of the storms.

A little more than a million dollars a year is what Portland sets aside when it comes to its snow budget.

City spokeswoman Nicole Clegg said the blizzard two weeks ago has put the city almost at that mark.

Nearly 3 feet of snow has fallen in Portland in the first few weeks of February.

More than 100 Department of Public Works crews spent days plowing, salting and sanding all of it.

The long hours are adding up to excessive overtime costs.

"This blizzard we had a couple weeks ago was a significant event for us. We spent in excess of $440,000 just in clearing the streets, hauling the snow, clearing sidewalks. That was an historic event for us and that took up almost half of our winter budget," said Clegg.

Compare that to one year ago, budget surpluses in the first three weeks of February, three storms, each dropped less than an inch of snow.

Ogunquit has seven full-time employees in the public works department. They will hit the roads this weekend clearing just 4 square miles, but even they have their budgets to meet.

They've already gone through all of the salt they budgeted for this year, $20,000 and they just ordered another 100 tons of salt costing up to $4,000.

"I think we used maybe 40 percent of our overtime budget last year. Where this year we're at 100, a little over 100 percent on that already, because like I said, all of the storms seem to be happening on the weekend or they come on a holiday," said Jack Whitney with Ogunquit Public Works.

As the snow impacts budgets small and large, there's no perfect formula out there when trying to figure out how much will be spent in a given year.

"I think we wish we could look into a crystal ball and know exactly what to budget for the next winter, that's not really realistic. But for the last four winters we've been under budget. The year before that we were over budget," said Clegg.

With so many city and towns at the brink of going over budget already, many are making plans to offset the snow costs but cutting or shifting other expenses in the budget.